The Disintegrations

Four writers, four different perspectives on the problematic notion of purity. "All purity is created by resemblance and disavowal." With this sentence as a starting point, four authors each write a novella considering the concept of purity, all from astonishingly different angles. Jean Marc Ah-Sen writes about love blooming between two writers belonging to feuding literary movements. Emily Anglin explores an architect's search for her twin at a rural historic house. Devon Code documents the Wittgensteinian upheavals of the last days of an elderly woman. And Lee Henderson imagines Dada artist Kurt Schwitters finding unlikely inspiration in a Second World War internment camp in northern Norway. Wildly different in style and subject matter, these four virtuoso pieces give us a 360-degree view of a philosophical theme that has never felt so urgent. “Despite the disparity of their subject matter – a Nazi-evading Dadaist detained in Norway, urban and familial estrangements, complicated love amid the avant-garde, the vicissitudes of old age – these brilliantly inventive, delightfully strange stories cling together like four unlikely soulmates, unified by art’s pursuit of coherence through life’s various disintegrations.” —Pasha Malla, author of Kill the Mall

Scholars have long been fascinated by the creative struggles with genre manifested throughout Dostoevsky’s career. In The Novel in the Age of Disintegration, Kate Holland brings historical context to bear, showing that Dostoevsky wanted to use the form of the novel as a means of depicting disintegration brought on by various crises in Russian society in the 1860s. This required him to reinvent the genre. At the same time he sought to infuse his novels with the capacity to inspire belief in social and spiritual reintegration, so he returned to some older conventions of a society that was already becoming outmoded. In thoughtful readings of Demons, The Adolescent, A Writer’s Diary, and The Brothers Karamazov, Holland delineates Dostoevsky’s struggle to adapt a genre to the reality of the present, with all its upheavals, while maintaining a utopian vision of Russia’s future mission.

This innovative, haunting autobiographical novel recounts McCartney's lifelong obsession with death. Wry yet somber, astringent yet tender, The Disintegrations confronts both the impossibility of understanding death and the timeless longing for immortality.